Giving Your Brain a Boost

According to an article in the Big News Network, this endless year of campaigning could have a silver lining. Election-year politics could give your brain a boost: "the fever pitch of the season can," says Neuro-pharmacologist John D. Roache of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio inspire us in many ways. "The brain has hard-wired systems that control attention and learning in processes that motivate us, including hunger, sex drive and social involvement." An interest in politics can perhaps stimulate these systems in the brain!

We should be so lucky!

"As we listen to the candidates and think about what is being said, the brain processes the information, which grows neural connections and increases the neurochemical signaling that is associated with learning and memory," says Roache. Actively participating in the election campaigns may be even more beneficial than merely following them.

"If we become emotionally engaged and even become politically active by going to a rally or actively campaigning for a candidate, then the greater levels of emotion or commitment further enhance the brain processes and connect them all the more with the emotion and physical activity involved," he said. ...Here's hoping!

Thinking in an Age of Complexity

How to Think: Managing Brain Resources in an Age of Complexity by Ed Boyden in Technology Review is brilliant article, excerpted herer

"When I applied for my faculty job at the MIT Media Lab, I had to write a teaching statement. One of the things I proposed was to teach a class called "How to Think," which would focus on how to be creative, thoughtful, and powerful in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure. In the process of thinking about this, I composed 10 rules...

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read...

2. Learn how to learn, rapidly... Be able to rapidly prototype ideas. Know how your brain works.

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there...

4. Always have a long-term plan. Even if you change it every day...

5. Make contingency maps. Draw all the things you need to do on a big piece of paper, and find out which things depend on other things...

6. Collaborate.

7. Make your mistakes quickly... Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on...

8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols... Instinctualize conscious control.

9. Document everything obsessively. If you don't record it, it may never have an impact on the world..

10. Keep it simple... If you can spend two days thinking of ways to make it 10 times simpler,
do it...